This seems not to be an opinion that other people hold, but I never saw social media as “free speech” given that some third party can decides which parts of what you say get promoted.
If you sent letters to people via a middleman who decided which of those to forward onwards, you’d see that as censorship. I appreciate that that’s an over-simplified example - it’s meant to be a reductio ad absurdum. But control of the algorithm effectively regulates free speech, IMO.
Also (for clarity) the fact that China happens to be involved is not relevant to my point!
Location: London, UK
Remote: At least hybrid!
Willing to relocate: Would consider Copenhagen or Lisbon
Technologies: TypeScript, Python, React, Terraform, AWS, a little Azure, very familiar with event-driven architectures
Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theodore-breuer-weil-2a975274/ (CV available on profile)
Email: theobreuerweil@gmail.com
Hi! I'm Theo! I'm a product-minded, full-stack engineer with 7-8 years' experience. I like to think of myself as proactive, pragmatic and an strong communicator. My experience is primarily in architecting and building event-driven services in AWS, and I've also got lots of experience with React and Python.
While I love programming, my favourite thing about being an engineer is building things that are useful and nailing down the right model for the domain. I'm a big believer in observability.
My experience is mostly at start-ups and scale-ups to date. In recent roles I've been working as a the principal engineer / engineering manager. I want to focus on being an individual contributor for the moment.
I've been working fully-remotely for the past 6 months and I'm really not enjoying it at all. I'm looking for a senior, back-end-leaning role at a company with smart, collaborative people who I can see in real life!
It’s funny, I always thought it was obviously egg. Assuming evolution, the first recognisable “chicken” must have been the product of a mutation, hence the egg from which it hatched was the origin of the first ever chicken.
When you pay for goods or services, you should expect to receive something. If you pay extra for leather seats, you’re getting leather seats. If you pay for DLC as part of a game, you’re subsidising the cost of the developer adding more stuff to the game. The pricing of digital products and add-ons may not always be fair but you should be getting access to something valuable that you didn’t already have, i.e. something that costs money to develop and/or host.
In this case, you already bought and paid for the additional RAM. The manufacturer is refusing to let you use it until you pay additional money, even though you theoretically own it already. That’s not providing a service, it’s just extortion.
If you could somehow prove that the additional RAM was not factored into the original cost of what you bought then this might be fair (albeit wasteful) - but I doubt it…
You may be right, I’ve no idea. For me it’s the principle more than the specific amount. I can’t understand why a manufacturer is entitled to charge you to use something that you supposedly own. Car manufacturers charging to unlock seat heating is a good example.
There is a middle ground between woodworking and TikTok, no? People enjoyed talking to each other and had fun before we had technology.
It’s easy to see social media as harmless, and maybe it is, but it also has the potential to act as a powerful tool for serving propaganda and brainwashing.
I’m not suggesting an actual conspiracy theory here but it’s concerning that a few huge companies have the power to broadcast (and control) the flow of information to a majority of population, who will consume that information by and large without suspicion.
If for some reason Facebook or TikTok really wanted to meaningfully shift public opinion, they probably could, and in any direction they might choose.
There wasn't a time "before we had technology". Best to avoid that
line of thinking if you want to escape the determinist (Veblem) trap
and end up like Kaczynski.
Postman is an author we enjoy but seldom acknowledge the wider genre
into which he fits. It's called "tech critique".
You can study it through the ages, comparing the outlooks and
influences of Einstein, Ellul, Freud, Fromm, Heidegger, Illich,
Kaczynski, Marcuse, Mumford, Nietzsche, and Postman, as well as sci-fi
writers like Wells, Forster, Clarke, Gibson, Le Guin, Dick...It makes
a very good companion to a study of the philosophy of science.
Some takeaways (at least ones that stick in my mind):
Technology is inseparable from the human condition, There are no
primitivist escapes, noble savages or gardens of Walden.
By the same token there is not and won't ever be any golden age of
Utopian technology.
Technology most closely resembles a "drug" in all its manifest
functions.
Technology comes with an accumulative maintenance cost.
It is monotonic/directional. There's no easy way back and we can't
uninvent stuff.
Minimising the _harms_ of technology while maximising the benefits and
maintaining human dignity amidst it is the best we can do.
Even if initially excited by new developments all people are
ultimately ambivalent about technology. They fear it, use it
begrudgingly and resent their dependency on it. Iron bridges and steam
locomotives raised the same questions as GPS and iPhones do today.
Many people romanticise and worship technology. It is a secular God.
If we "love" it, it's the sick love of an addict or the sadomasochistic
power glee (tech "dealers" like Ellison, Zuck, and Musk)
A tiny few (that's us) enjoy a curious fascination that makes tech an
"end in itself". Those people get used to create a supply for the
dealers and addicts.
Anyway you gotta love Postman, if only for exquisite use of
"centrifugal bumblepuppy". What he describes in this passage is really
the soporific control/domination effects of technology in the hands of
tyrants/dealers who delight in the subjugation of attention - which I
think is made best by Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America.
Well, this was nothing if not besides the point. Anyone on this site should recognize that when people like the person you responded to use the word "technology", especially in this context, it is typically a colloquialism for information technology, as in television, computers, phones and the like.
Even in colloquial English amongst the public, "technology" hasn't referred to technology in general for several decades, but simply to "information technology". It has become so common that the general public refers to the entire information technology industry simply as "tech" or the "tech industry", which excludes all traditional engineering disciplines outside of electrical, despite all those disciplines working with technology.
Yes, popular parochialism is another common theme discussed in tech
critique. Each generation believes its technology to be an exceptional
pinnacle, disconnected from its antecedents. It starts to see the
world in no other terms. What you're saying feels like a reformulation
of McLuhan's "the medium is the message". People who see their world
only through the TV or smartphone screen can no longer "see" the
technology that undergirds it. Their world gets smaller, into a
Plato's cave if you like.
I disagree that influence is really that malleable. Even if we take the power of selection algorithms for granted it is still constrained and must work with the 'winds' of the content posted. If they tried something 'simple' as promoting non-mammalian meat sources they would only succeed in creating memes mocking the concept.
Besides, the most "effective" influencer does next to nothing because they were going to do that sort of thing already. There is a reason you see music stars doing promotionals for pleasurable to consume caloried drinks as a use for personal funds and not say deferred gratification products like investment banking.
I have a take on this. As technology makes it cheaper to distribute things (I'm thinking all the way from printing press to VHS to streaming) the target audience grows. Each revolution in distribution broadens the pool of consumers. A book in the 1500s was only available to (and therefore likely directed at) wealthy and highly-educated people. Today, many (or most?) people can afford a Netflix account. Almost any Western person can watch a Tiktok video. I'm not trying to say that richer people are somehow better than the average person but I hope it's fair to say that, as media can reach more and more people, the target audience becomes less "sophisticated".
> book in the 1500s was only available to (and therefore likely directed at) wealthy and highly-educated people
Those people also had to compete, in the long run, for their positions. Broadening scope from a selected sample to the population necessarily degrades quality as the common denominator is pursued.
On the other hand, it creates tremendous wealth which allows niche art to flourish. (On the third hand, populism hates niche art.)
With EVs the focus becomes how wonderful they are because they do not burn fossil fuels in their engines. Great, but what about what all the other issues (including non renewable issues in the rest of the supply chain involved in building the EV)? They're greenwashed away - no need to discuss public transit and densification. EVs will fix everything and we don't need to change our life on any significant way.
They are a way to continue going down the wrong path and feel good about it.
I’m not 100% on this but the way I understood this is by analogy to the 2D surface of the Earth. The surface of the Earth is finite yet has no reachable edge. The universe is the same in 3D. Like if the Earth grew then there would be more land but still no more or less “edge” of the world, and the same could hold for the universe. That said I think this is one theory rather than accepted fact?
This would mean the universe has positive curvature. Experimental evidence points towards the universe being flat (zero curvature), though there is some margin for error that could go either way (positive or negative curvature).
In particular, almost none of them are isotropic. The assumption that the universe is isotropic is part of the cosmological principle and the foundation of modern cosmology. It's a very natural assumption to make, so the vast majority of cosmologists are quite comfortable with it, but at the end of the day it's just an assumption that could be wrong.
In the case of a universe of finite size, this analogy explains how there can be such a thing as a finite space without there being boundaries provided the space is (slightly) curved.
So this has less to do with an infinitely sized universe and more with the question of “What exists beyond the edge of the universe if it would be finite in size?”
So `status pls` means: call the function status (which leaves its results on the stack) and print the top of the stack with new-lines (multiple lines if it's an array).
Then `status upcase pls` would do something like the above, but it calls a "to uppercase" function before printing.
While I think 'pl' and 'pls' for print line and print lines is probably an excellent choice overall I can't help but see 'pls' and try and parse it as an abbreviated INTERCAL.
If you sent letters to people via a middleman who decided which of those to forward onwards, you’d see that as censorship. I appreciate that that’s an over-simplified example - it’s meant to be a reductio ad absurdum. But control of the algorithm effectively regulates free speech, IMO.
Also (for clarity) the fact that China happens to be involved is not relevant to my point!
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